It’s finally here — LAUNCH: Beyond Waste! We’ve been working for the last six months to get to this point. We head out to Pasadena, California this week to hear from nine innovators with creative ways to create value from discarded products — plastic bottles, human and plant waste, unused fabric, and more.

LAUNCH, for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it before, is a social entrepreneurship enterprise that breaks new ground in public/private partnerships. We created the LAUNCH program three years ago to address large, sustainability-related challenges that no single government or commercial entity can solve alone. Our talented LAUNCH team searches for transformative innovations, which we connect with a collaborative group of thought leaders and experts which we call LAUNCH Council. LAUNCH Innovators are uniquely poised to accelerate their innovations for greater impact and scale by leveraging the advice, networks, and resources of the LAUNCH Council members and the global stage LAUNCH provides.

The ultimate goal of LAUNCH is a sustainable future for planet Earth and her citizens.

The LAUNCH: Beyond Waste forum is the fourth in a series of challenges, following Water, Health, and Energy. The LAUNCH team focused on waste as a challenge topic in order to address increasing strain on the planet’s limited resources. Global citizens, as well as explorers who leave Earth’s protection, share the need for creative solutions to the issue of waste — from designing for zero waste to revaluing existing waste from inefficient production and processes. LAUNCH: Beyond Waste addresses this global challenge.

I love the tagline from Anshu Gupta of Goonj, one of our innovators from India, who wants to transform the cash society into a trash society — meaning trash = revenue stream. Our western version: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Here are the cool movie posters our team (Trish and Lilly) created to represent each innovation we’ll feature at the forum.

Attero – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Goonj – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

Kiverdi – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

Pylantis – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

re:char – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

RecycleMatch – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Sanergy – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

SEaB – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Sirum – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Attero: Attero is India’s first low cost, efficient metal extraction technology for e-waste. With an integrated recycling and refurbishing facility and proprietary metallurgical processes (patent pending), Attero is the only end-to-end e-waste recycling company in India.

Goonj: Using urban waste streams as a powerful development resource in rural India, Goonj is dedicated to saving lives, empowering people, and ensuring dignity for the underserved poor in rural India. Through its activities, Goonj helps to create a parallel economy that is not ‘cash based’, but ‘trash based.’

Kiverdi: Kiverdi offers a proprietary bioprocess that recycles waste carbon from a number of waste streams, including syngas (from forestry residue and landfills), stranded natural gas or agricultural residue, to produce drop-in fuels, oils and custom chemicals. Kiverdi’s industrial scale bioreactor allows the company to transform biomass into high value industrial products.

Pylantis: Pylantis is a bioplastics company with a proprietary process that combines organic fillers (waste) with plant plastic resins to create high waste content injection molded products capable of withstanding temperatures up to 140C. Pylantis produces a wide variety of products that provide a commercially viable alternative to environmentally unsustainable traditional petroleum-based plastic products.

RecycleMatch: RecycleMatch is the first global on-line marketplace for recycling that connects waste generators, recyclers, and manufacturers. The RecycleMatch platform finds the ‘highest and best use’ for recyclables and ‘waste’ byproducts in the market.

SEaB Energy: SEaB provides companies a turn-key waste to energy product which uses micro anaerobic digestion to convert organic waste into energy on-site at the source of the waste generation where the energy can be utilized continuously.